Things I want my church to teach my children

Plus: a Dorothy Sayers biography, ignoring the courts, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Things I want my church to teach my children

(via)

I’ve been working on a big article pertaining to Christian education for Christianity Today (subscribe now to read it in print in May!), and repeatedly in my research I’ve come across Christian educators issuing a caveat: Of course, what we’re doing here is no substitute for home discipleship. Parents have the primary responsibility for transmitting their faith to their children; we can only reinforce what’s happening at home.

This is true, in a sense. Parents do have a unique responsibility to their children.¹ But it’s also true that there are some things we cannot teach—not in the way they really need to be taught, anyway. There are some lessons that can only be taught by a group, lessons that require a critical mass of people to transmit effectively.

For Christian parents, that group will typically be the local church. When I say here that there are things I want my church to teach my children, that is what I mean.

Of course, this isn’t all the church may teach them—in fact, little of it is explicitly Christian, let alone theological. Though I do think much here is closely related to our faith, there’s some sense in which I’m turning to church for these lessons because, as

Carrie McKean

argued at CT this week, there is no other comparable community institution left. Nor am I making anything close to a complete list of things in this category; these are simply the first such group lessons that came to mind.

How to hang out. This is a particularly pressing lesson now. I probably do not need to explain why if you are subscribed to my Substack and/or have heard the name “Jonathan Haidt,” but let me refer you to Carrie’s piece again and also to the Atlantic story on which her headline is riffing. Speaking of Haidt, actually, I’ve gestured this way in a post here before:

I don’t want to consign my kids to be the unfortunate few who can’t be in the group chat. That’s a line, I think, across which teenage accusations of “mean” parenting have a ring of truth. Not being in the group chat would be like being forced, c. 1998, to go study at the library during every lunch break instead of hanging out over a meal with your friends. It would be a huge social detriment, one I’m not willing to inflict. […]

The ideal, of course, is to avoid the trap Haidt describes: Make friends with families with a similar perspective on teenage phone use so the social pressure to have a smartphone isn’t significant in your kids’ social circle.

The best place to find those families is at church.

The group chat is the problem

When to get married. Median age of first marriage in the United States is now over 30 for men and approaching 29 for women. All things being equal—and, obviously, in many individual cases, they are not equal—this is too late. I don’t think we should go back to quite the youthfulness of weddings in the 1950s, but historical averages in the mid to low 20s (or thereabouts, and again, ceteris paribus) seem appropriate to me.

I can tell my kids how old my husband and I were when we married (23 and 24) and how well that worked. But, alas, I cannot personally model a youngish wedding anymore. I need a bunch of other people to do that on my behalf, repeatedly, when my kids are at the right age to notice and care. The people who can do this are at church.

What to do after high school. I have an emails job, albeit an unusual one. My husband has an emails job. I don’t know if our kids will want emails jobs! Nor do I know if they’ll want to work in education or childcare, the other two careers they will organically encounter at length between now and when they graduate.

Where might they get to know a bunch of other people doing all kinds of work, including trades, with competence and integrity? Church.

What to do when someone has a baby. Or a surgery. Or a broken car. Or a lost job. Or a new job! Or any of the hardships and joys sure to come. As I’ve written at CT:

We don’t go to church only for community and casseroles (or, if we do, we likely won’t go for long). Yet neither are community and casseroles irrelevant. We don’t “want people joining churches for the social perks,” as theologian Brad East recently wrote for CT, but the “Lord and his family come together.” We don’t have to disambiguate our allegiance to Jesus and enjoyment of the benefits of his church. In fact, we shouldn’t try. They are of a piece. The church is not a building, as my mother always drilled into my head, but it is a sturdy shelter in all kinds of storms.

Incidentally, this was always one half of my discontent with The Good Place, a show I liked very much in its early seasons.² The central ethical question was: “What do we owe each other?” If only someone had thought about this! If only there were a local institution designed for helping you fulfill that obligation!

What women can do. It feels positively retro to include this one, but it’s coming to mind, so here we are.

Are women human?

I grew up in complementarian churches and was not persuaded of the egalitarian perspective on women in ministry until my 20s.³ Even then, because of the available options near me, I attended a complementarian church for a couple years. I don’t recall having clear ideas at that point on whether I’d raise children in a church like that. Now I know I would not.

My turning point on this more prudential question came several years later. In church one Sunday, a friend of ours, who then led the congregation’s equivalent of an elder board, got up to make some minor business announcement. She was very pregnant, and I didn’t know, then, if I even wanted kids.

But watching her speak—watching her lead our church, a woman like me, so visibly female—fundamentally changed my thinking here. Something clicked that can’t unclick. My children will grow up seeing women in roles and leadership of all types. They will see it at church.

How men can be. Everyone is agonizing about masculinity lately, and not without cause. I won’t add to that here, as I don’t think I have particular insight. I will say, though, that churches have large groups of men who get together as dads with their kids and also gather in single-sex spaces to discuss and practice being good men.

So if, just for instance, there’s a leaked recording of a public figure lasciviously describing how he likes to assault women, my children will not say—as I have been wrongly assured—Well, all men talk like that when women aren’t around. They will have learned that is not true.

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Intake

• “Church in the antisocial century,” by

  Carrie McKean
  for Christianity Today (do not skip her delightful opening anecdote)

• Ross Douthat
  ’s article related to his new book and Brad East’s review of that book, both for Christianity Today

• “What IR theory predicts about Trump 2.0,” by Stephen M. Walt for Foreign Policy

• “Trumpian policy as cultural policy,” by Tyler Cowen for Marginal Revolution

• “Two injunctions against Trump’s citizenship decree expose the weakness of his arguments,” by Jacob Sullum for Reason

• “America’s world-leading rate of child welfare investigation, and other interesting new research,” by

  Stephanie H. Murray
  for
  Family Stuff

• I’ve just learned Alan Jacobs is doing a biography of Dorothy Sayers! And, if this post is any indication, perhaps it will have a good bit on the mystery novels?

• Severance season 2, naturally, with a nice little weekly watch party of friends and in-laws in the neighborhood

• Death Cab for Cutie’s Narrow Stairs. Hot tip for other parents running a school carpool with kids who sometimes bicker in the car: The children love Ben Gibbard. The children cannot keep themselves from hanging on his every perfectly enunciated word.

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Output

New work:

• The Syria rumor | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

I have a feeling I’ll be tempted to put this post here until, I dunno, January 20, 2029— and then also every week after that:

No one cares about procedure until it’s too late

Newly relevant because:

• “What if Trump just ignores the courts?” by Ezra Klein for The New York Times

So far, the Trump administration is largely abiding by the court orders. If they began simply saying the court system’s authority is illegitimate, that would throw American politics into a genuine constitutional crisis. Can the president simply ignore the courts and decide for himself what his power is? And what can or will the courts do if he tries?

Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance suggested the administration might try just that, writing on X that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” That word “legitimate” is doing all the work in Vance’s tweet. Who decides what the executive’s legitimate power is? Typically the courts. Vance is suggesting that it should be the president himself.

I’m not sharing this to pick on Klein particularly—on the contrary, I think his interrogation of this situation is more sensible than many, and I agree that it’s perilous if the executive branch disregards the judicial. The problem is that video exists in this world, and therefore we can all know for certain that people including the last president and prominent members of his party spoke about the courts in a similar way. So, as I was saying …

I’ll give the final word on this to

Noah Millman

, in an interesting history piece also at the Times:

The central justification for all of these moves is the view that the American constitutional order has become sclerotic. The bureaucracy, it is claimed, operates with a mind of its own, unresponsive to either the people’s will or the nation’s interests. Congress is too divided and hesitant to make fundamental changes; it prefers to delegate interpreting the Constitution to the courts and regulatory rule-making to the executive whenever possible. In this view, if anyone—especially the court—stands in the way of an energetic executive, it will only be standing for stasis and failure, and should be ignored.

That view can be rebutted in any number of ways. […] But even if the grim diagnosis is correct, the deeper question is what will remain of our constitutional order after such radical surgery.

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1. This is absolutely not an entry into JD Vance discourse.

2. The other half is that the “sweet” ending—in which the main characters finally choose annihilation because they determine that even blissful existence gets old in a godless universe—was depressing and unsettling yet played for warm fuzzies. I suppose it made a weak case for God in a roundabout way, but thinking about what works on TV, the obvious choice was to get them alive again with hell memories intact at the end of season 3 or so, then end it there: all potential, no afterlife euthanasia.

3. I’m not going to litigate this disagreement or go into my own decision here, but I’ve written a bit more on how I changed my mind on this in A Flexible Faith, if (ahem!) you’re looking for a reason to buy it.